The present invention relates to mass mail delivery mechanisms and, more particularly, to bar code recognition in an electronic printstream of an electronic delivery mechanism.
Many businesses currently send out mass mailings to their customers or prospective customers. For example, a utility, e.g. electric company, may send out hundreds of thousands of bills to its customers every month. As another example, a company may wish to send targeted marketing material, such as a sales letter, to prospective customers on a mailing list. In either example, a company may augment the bill or basic sales letter with additional material called xe2x80x9cinserts,xe2x80x9d for example, a brochure or a glossy advertisement.
There currently exist computer systems, software, and specialized peripherals for producing mass mailings for physical delivery, e.g. through the U.S. Postal Service or by courier. With the advent of new forms of electronic mail delivery, however, it is becoming more desirable to augment existing mass mailing capability with electronic delivery mechanisms, such as by electronic mail (email), facsimile, pager, or publication to a page on the World Wide Web. However, there are many reasons why it is difficult to upgrade or replace these computers systems for electronic mail delivery.
Often these computer systems are called xe2x80x9clegacyxe2x80x9d computer systems because they are relatively old computer systems handed down from previous generations of company management. These legacy computer systems, however, are still effective and often control processing vital to the company""s business, e.g. bill production. Such legacy systems for mass mailing document production typically run on a mainframe computer and are complex and expensive. Accordingly, companies are reluctant to modify, upgrade, or replace these critical document generation applications.
Another reason why upgrading a business application is difficult is that the business application is written by a third-party developer with exclusive access to the source code and unwilling or unable to upgrade the application. For example, the business application may have been written by a company that has gone out of business or discontinued support for that application.
Yet another reason it is difficult to transition from paper based mail to electronic mail is document recognition. That is, the recognition of individualized personal documents (e.g., billing statements) that is to be included in each mailpiece. For instance, in typical legacy printed applications, when a billing printstream is delivered to a printing mechanism, the printing mechanism causes the printstream to be generated into a plurality of billing statements, wherein each billing statement is of course unique to the intended recipient and includes a barcode that is unique to that recipient. The barcode is typically generated and embedded in the printstream by the legacy application and when printed and recognized by known scanning techniques, the barcode identifies unique information regarding the recipient of the mail piece. Such information can include addressing, geographic, demographic and insert criteria, which information is used by a document inserting system to build a mail piece around the recipient""s personalized document. Thus the information included in the barcode of each personalized document is critical to the operation of the inserting system that is building the mail piece for the personalized document of each recipient.
But when an electronic mail piece generation and delivery system is coupled to the aforesaid legacy printstrean applications, the information embedded in the barcode in each document contained in a printstream can not be utilized by the electronic mail piece and generation system as each document is never printed. Thus the barcode associated by each document is never scanned and interpolated by the electronic mail piece generation and delivery system. In other words, the information embedded in the barcode associated with the document for each recipient is xe2x80x9clostxe2x80x9d by the electronic mail piece generation and delivery system. Therefore, when such an electronic mail piece generation and delivery system is coupled to an existing legacy document printstream generating application, some of the information embedded in each document, via the barcode, contained in the printstream produced by the legacy application cannot be utilized by the electronic mail piece generation and delivery system.
Even if a company has access to the source code of its mass mailing application, the company may not have the resources in terms of time or programming staff to make the necessary modifications for electronic mail delivery to overcome the non-utilization of the barcode associated with each document in the printstream produced by a legacy printstream application.
There exists a need for adding capabilities of electronic mail delivery to existing mass mailing systems and to be able to interpolate electronic barcodes compiled in the raw printstream.
These and other needs are met by an electronic delivery system and method in which a database contains a plurality of electronic documents wherein at least some of the electronic documents have an associated barcode in an electronic printstream. An electronic document delivery system is coupled to the database and is operative for splitting the electronic printstream into a plurality of electronic documents. The electronic delivery system then integrates the electronic documents to identify the presence of barcodes which are associated with at least some of the electronic documents. The electronic delivery system then generates electronic mail pieces using the information obtained from the identification of the electronic barcodes. Next, an electronic message router delivers the electronic mail pieces.